Barefoot With A Stranger

by Roxanne St Claire

  “You like that,” he murmured, happy that he could make her feel so good.

  “Define like.”

  He laughed and headed south, working on her jeans as she was unzipping his. She slipped her hand in and closed her fingers around his shaft, sending a shock through his system.

  “And you like that,” she teased with kisses on his chest, each one making him fall a little harder for her.

  She pushed his jeans down and used both hands to stroke him, temporarily paralyzing his efforts to get her undressed. He couldn’t think about anything but the heat of her hands, the way she worked his cock, up and down, around the tip.

  Release threatened way too soon.

  “Don’t,” he muttered, trying to pull out of her hand. “Wait.”

  “I can’t.” She ignored him, stroking harder. “I won’t wait.”

  He almost laughed at her determination, but other sensations got in the way. Heat and blood and an ache that started low in his back and deep in his balls.

  “You made me come in the car,” she said, pushing him onto his back.

  “That was different. I don’t want to be done…yet.” He bit the last word, fighting the urge to just give in and let her stroke and…oh, kiss him. Down his stomach, her tongue flicking, her hands caressing…her mouth on him.

  “Francesca.” He dug his fingers into her hair, holding her head, guiding her…just for a second. A few seconds. A minute. He rocked into her kisses and let her suck lightly, then harder. “Stop it.”

  He pushed her head away, so close to coming he could barely see her through eyes he had to squeeze shut.

  “Condom,” he muttered, reaching toward a nightstand like one would magically appear.

  “In my bag.” They both said it at exactly the same second.

  He laughed softly, rolling to grab whatever bag was closest. “We both brought them.”

  “Talk about hopeful.”

  He grabbed the box and tossed it on the bed. “Don’t talk at all,” he ordered.

  She held his gaze, long and hot, and he could read everything in her expression, as clear as if she said the words. This isn’t hopeless. He should have known.

  He should have known because he felt the same way. Damn it.

  Kneeling over her, silent, he tore the box, grabbed a packet, and started to slide it over his engorged dick, refusing to look at her while he did, hating that his hands didn’t feel steady.

  But then she reached out and touched him, taking over, rolling the condom down.

  “C’mere,” she said huskily, drawing him down. As he got on top of her, she wrapped her legs around his hips and met his gaze. “I can’t wait anymore.”

  He closed his eyes and found his way into her, arching enough to watch her face as he entered her body, holding back before he plunged in. Pleasure swamped him, silencing everything. She was hot, tight perfection. Beautiful and willing and warm and wet.

  And he was so lost he couldn’t have remembered his name if he’d had to.

  This didn’t need a label, but it had one. And it sure as hell wasn’t “hopeless.”

  Not when she murmured sexy words and scraped her nails over his back. Not when she bowed her back and invited him deeper inside her. And when she bit her lip and cried out and a climax clawed at his conscience and crushed his senses…it was full of hope.

  Fucking overloaded with hope.

  He silenced that by listening to the sultry sounds of her orgasm. She moaned and whimpered and fought for control, losing it as completely as he did until they both collapsed in a heap of satisfaction and, damn it, hope.

  It was Chessie’s secret power, and he was drowning in it. And all he wanted in the whole world was more.

  And more and more.

  “We’re not done yet,” he whispered huskily in her ear.

  “We have all night,” she agreed.

  But that wasn’t what he meant. Not what he meant at all.

  Chapter Twenty

  The municipal finally opened mid-morning the next day, along with the palms of the three people who showed up for work. Mal greased them liberally, making slow progress until they were finally allowed into a file library.

  He hadn’t been kidding about the paper.

  Chessie turned slowly, blinking at boxes upon boxes, file cabinets, and loose papers piled on the floor. She felt a slow burn of frustration roll through her—the first time she’d felt anything other than satisfaction since they’d fallen asleep together, woke up in the middle of the night for another round, and repeated it all at dawn.

  That whole no-strings thing? It sure felt like it was getting a little stringy. But she couldn’t think about it today, not now that she’d gotten what she wanted most: access to real information.

  Sort of real. Sort of information. Regardless, she threw herself into the process of finding a trail that would lead to a four-year-old boy who would call her Aunt Chessie.

  The man who’d brought them into the room pointed to a stack of cheap cardboard file boxes stuffed with blue, pink, green, and goldenrod papers. “Registros de nacimiento. Diez años.”

  “The last decade of recorded births,” Mal explained as the man left the room without a good-bye.

  “Are you kidding me?” Chessie dropped on to one of two chairs next to a folding card table. “We have to go through every one to find a birth record for a child named Gabriel Winter?”

  “We know the year.”

  “It’ll take a year.” She pulled out a bunch of the tissue-thin papers from a crate. “Crap, it’s all in Spanish.” Chessie fingered one of the bright orange sheets, transported back to her childhood when she’d tag along with Mom and she’d file papers in Dad’s law office. These were carbon copies, right out of another century. She hadn’t known they even made that stuff anymore.

  She dropped the pages on the card table and started to read.

  “Did you bring that rosary?” Mal asked.

  “Prayer isn’t going to make this go any faster.” She gestured toward her bag. “It’s where you put it last night.”

  He dragged it out. “I was thinking about something in the middle of the night.”

  She gave him a look. “A rosary?”

  “A message. I’m wondering if Ramos really wanted to give you a message.”

  Chessie looked up, blinking at him. “Really?”

  “There’s no other explanation.”

  A message? Was everything always code words and secret messages with spies? She searched his face, feeling her heart ratchet up. “Okay, but until you figure that out, we dig for the needle in this haystack. Maybe when you reach Gabe, we can find out.”

  Gabe had called back, but this time they’d missed his call and the message was garbled.

  “In the meantime, I have an idea that you would call ridiculously hopeful,” she said.

  “Hey, bring it. I’m starting to become a believer in you.”

  She grinned at him. “Mal Harris, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  He lifted a brow, the look a sexy reminder of all the nice things he’d said last night.

  “In the last ten minutes,” she added, pulling out her laptop. “I think I can get on the Internet in here.”

  “Possibly, but how is that going to help us go through these files?” he asked.

  “See these?” She tapped the brightly colored papers on the desk with one hand and clicked to bring the screen to life with the other. “They’re copies. Pink, blue, green, and, my personal favorite, goldenrod.”

  He looked at her like she’d slipped off her rocker, but she grinned back and touched the track pad.

  “You know what that means, Mal?”

  “I think I’m about to find out.”

  “It means that somewhere there’s an original, which is white. Always white. You know what I don’t see? White paper, not anywhere in this room.” The screen hummed to life, and she waited to get Internet access through the Canadian server she’d lined up ea
rlier that morning on the satellite phone. “The whites went somewhere. Most likely Havana. Didn’t you say everything funnels up to the national level in this country?”

  “The national Communist level,” he said, lowering his voice as if there were a possibility they were being spied on. Of course Mal would think that.

  “Communists keep files of births,” she replied.

  “They do,” he agreed. “They just don’t put them in Excel spreadsheets or hackable databases.”

  “They might.” No Internet. Chessie took a breath. “You obviously do not know my database-hacking skills, my personal level of determination to get shit done, and the burning desire I have to walk into my brother’s office and tell him he has a reason to live again.”

  After a moment of staring at the damn spinning circle, she looked up to find his eyes boring a hole through her. “What?” she asked.

  “I believe in you.” He sounded nothing less than stunned by the realization. His voice was low and genuine. A lot like he sounded in the throes—and aftermath—of sex.

  “Well, thanks.”

  “No, I’m serious. You’re impressive. You don’t quit, do you?”

  “Not when I want Internet,” she said, going for light because the look on his face was anything but.

  “Not when you love someone.”

  She felt her jaw loosen in amazement and some blood rush to her face. “You’re right, I don’t,” she agreed. “Why do I get the feeling that surprises you?”

  He shook his head as if he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer the question, pretending to be overly involved in a few of the papers in front of him.

  “Mal?” Chessie prodded. “Who quit on you?”

  “Everyone I ever knew,” he answered.

  “As I said, you must be hanging out with the wrong people.”

  He finally looked up, hurt around the edges of his eyes. “Must be.”

  The computer flashed and stole her attention, the screen turning white with the home page of the Canadian website she wanted. “And I must be”—she grinned at him—“a miracle worker. I just got Internet.”

  He leaned closer. “Really? Now what?”

  She started clicking, slowly working her way through backdoors and secret places that were like a second home to her. “This could take a while.”

  He shuffled papers. “So could this.”

  “Then let’s see who finds something first, okay?” She tapped a key and found a little wormhole of information, but that place required a password. So she moved on to the next corner of the Internet maze.

  “I found a pile of papers from 2011,” he said.

  “Well, I found the SQL server injections that I need to crack any database in any secure environment,” she replied.

  They both worked in silenced for a while.

  “Aha,” Mal said. “I found four babies named Gabriel, but their parents are noted and not names I recognize.”

  “Good,” she said, a tad condescendingly. “But I found a Metasploit command prompt. Time to play guess the password.”

  He put his papers down and leaned closer. “How the hell are you going to do that?”

  “I have my ways, master spy. I have my ways.”

  They returned to silence as she battled configurations, threads, and password combinations, and he pulled more papers. And sure enough, the config emerged, and she landed the rhosts, and about two hours and sixty thousand fluttering word combinations later, she had sysadmin privileges.

  “Woo-hoo,” she said, pushing back.

  “You have a password.”

  “Not yet. But soon.”

  “I have seventeen Gabriels in 2011. Six in the summer.”

  “Parents?”

  “All wrong.”

  “Keep working,” she ordered. “By the way, what’s the winner get? I’d like to think about it while I grab the hashes here.”

  He rolled his eyes at her tech talk. “The winner gets…anything he—”

  “Or she—”

  “Wants.”

  “Anything?” She smiled and tapped faster. “Motivation is a marvelous thing.”

  “So are you.”

  * * *

  By three thirty in the afternoon, Mal had a pile of papers listing boys born in 2011 in this municipality named Gabriel—none with the right last name, but some vague enough to merit researching. Several addresses were near enough to drive to today, and Mal actually considered starting the search.

  But Chessie had been telling him for the past two hours that she was close. At least, he thought that’s what she was saying. Mostly she mumbled to herself in computer-speak.

  He’d paid the empleado del municipal a handsome sum to leave them alone, but he had a feeling even that much cash wasn’t going to buy them enough time. And he doubted they’d get back in tomorrow. That guy would likely take the day off and spend his two months’ free wages.

  “How close are you, Bill Gates?” he asked.

  “So close.” She hadn’t broke concentration, except for the three times she’d lost her Internet connection and sounded a lot more like a different Rossi when her language got colorful. But she never stopped trying.

  When he’d stop to look over her shoulder at the screen, it was nothing but a sea of binary numbers, white on black, flickering and flashing, moving. Mal’s findings weren’t great, but they were immediate. And tangible. And the day was getting late.

  “How much—”

  She held one finger up to stop him. “Portonueve.”

  “What?”

  “Come here and read this.” She reached for his hand, pulling him around to point to a word on the screen. “That’s the password that’s going to open many, many file drawers in cyberspace for me,” she said excitedly.

  “Really? That’s great.”

  “But this is where it starts to get a little iffy.”

  “Starts?” She’d been at this for five hours.

  She gave his arm a poke. “Be positive, honey. Pos-i-tive. Translate for me. Portonueve means…”

  “It means door nine. Or ninth door. Does that help?”

  She blew out a slow breath and typed. “Maybe. There’s a code in there that should be found in every password. Porto is door?”

  “And nueve is nine.”

  “Let’s try changing the number. Count from one to ten in Spanish and spell.”

  He did, and she typed, but every time, access was denied. “Damn it,” she muttered on the last one. “Let’s flip it. What’s the word for window?”

  “Ventana.”

  She typed it. “Nope. How else can you get into a house or building?”

  “Chimney?”

  She laughed. “Okay. What’s the Spanish word for it?”

  “Uh…chimenea, I think.” He spelled it, and she typed as he spoke. No access.

  “Damn it,” he muttered.

  “No, no, don’t panic,” she said, typing again. “Did you see that little string of numbers that flashed under it?”

  “No.”

  She clicked on a line of code, highlighting it. “You’re on to something with the chimney, Santa Claus. Tell me those numbers again.”

  “Uno, dos, tres…”

  Her fingers flew, and suddenly, the whole screen flickered, turned black, turned white—

  “Oh no,” he said.

  “You are such a pessimist, Mal Harris!” She held her fingers off the keyboard and stared at the screen, and suddenly, line after line after line started appearing, as if someone else were typing. “And a genius,” she added. “We are in the official government database listing every birth in the country of—”

  “Perdóname.” A woman they hadn’t yet met walked in, pointing to a clock on the wall. “Estamos cerado. Se tenien que ir.”

  “She says they’re closing,” Mal explained.

  “It’s not even four o’clock!” Chessie exclaimed.

  Yes, too early to close in the States, but not too early to siphon money off the Americ
ans who really shouldn’t even be in the room. Mal reached into his pocket, aware that, at the table, Chessie slowly inched her screen down low enough to hide what she was doing but not turn off the laptop.

  The woman’s expression softened almost immediately when the cash was flashed. Glancing at the door, as if she might get caught, her dark features melted. “No, no…” In other words: How much can I get?

  Nothing had changed since he’d been in Cuba last, despite the fact that more flights arrived and an American flag now flew over an embassy. He handed her a wad of bills, and she let out a sigh and murmured an apology.

  Mal nodded and gestured for her to leave, but the woman’s gaze drifted over the stacks of papers to the computer, and then she gasped.

  Busted for the laptop, no doubt. That’d cost Mal twenty more.

  But her eyes weren’t on the computer. They were on the rosary, on the table where Chessie had left it.

  “El Sagrado Corazón.” She pointed to the beads. “Please to touch it?”

  “Of course,” Chessie said, picking up the rosary to hand to her.

  The woman took it with loving care, caressing the beads that clearly meant something to her and pressing the cross to her heart for a moment. “Donde consiguiste esto?”

  Mal wasn’t about to tell her where he got it, or who its real owner was. “Fue un regalo. A gift.” He shot Chessie a look that he hoped she’d understand meant don’t offer this as payment.

  She didn’t say a word, though, keeping one hand on her computer and looking far more nervous about losing her laptop than the rosary.

  The woman held the string of beads in the air, letting the cross turn on its beaded chain. Then she took it to the window and held it up, the red jewel at eye level. “Ahh,” she said, pointing to the heart. “Está grabado.”

  “What did she say?” Chessie asked.

  Mal stepped closer. “It’s engraved?” And then he remembered what was special about these crosses. They had the owner’s name and usually a prayer engraved inside. Had it been engraved when Gabe bought it?

  The woman nodded as she held the cross still, letting the light filter through the stone, where there must be tiny words.